Housing Market

If you haven’t already discovered it HSH Associates runs a great Web site with lots of free data for checking the latest mortgage rates. One of the things I keep hearing from Realtors and home builders is that rates are still low. That’s true if you’re comparing them to the 20% prime rate of 1980. Today’s rate of around 6.3% for a 30 year fixed rate mortgage is actually high when compared with other income investments. A 10-year Treasury bond yields 3.8% for example.

HSH analyst Keith Gumbinger says his firm went back and looked at the spread between 30 year mortgage rates and Treasury securities going back to 1986 and found a spread larger than today in only 32 of the more than 1,100 weeks. Those weeks were mostly back in 1986 and 1987. What that tells us is that investors are more than willing to buy safer government bonds today and less interested in riskier mortgage securities.

“Mortgage buyers are just on strike right now,” Gumbinger says. He figures if mortgage rates reflected a more normal spread to Treasury bonds, a home loan would cost more like 5.5% today.

Since my Mom keeps asking me what she should do with her beaten-up Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae mortgage securities I asked Gumbinger the same. Don’t sell, he said. “Take your yield, be happy,” he said. “They make a very attractive investment right now.”

Seattle-based Columbia Pacific has closed its second round of financing for Columbia Asia, the money management firm's hospital consortium, adding $135 million to bring the fund's total amount of equity raised to $325 million.

While many of the details are being kept mum, permanent financing to the tune of approximately $21 million has been put in place for the 25-acre Hyatt Regency Hotel property in Newport Beach, Calif.

A joint venture involving Ivy Equities and Urdang Capital Management has gotten its hands on nearly $25.2 million in financing for a group of four office buildings in Parsippany, N.J.

Schuff Steel Co. has topped out the new conference center that is part of the L.A. Live development in Los Angeles. The 27-acre development began with the construction of the Staples Center where the Lakers play, in 2002.

Redevelopment of the site that was once home to the Borscht Belt’s legendary Concord Hotel, in Kiamesha Lake, N.Y., has taken two major steps forward. In one, Concord Associates L.P., joint venture partner of Empire Resorts Inc., has completed a $225 million equity loan financing with Entertainment Properties Trust, a REIT based in Kansas City. In the other, the County of Sullivan (N.Y.) Industrial Development Agency has announced a $300 million bond financing for the resort’s redevelopment, the agency’s first major funding for the $1.1 billion project.

Clark Construction Group-California has commenced work on University Gateway, a 421-unit mixed-use student housing development in Los Angeles, just across from the University of Southern California.

Unlike previous housing slumps, the one we're in now has spread from coast to coast. But that doesn't mean that every market is suffering equally. The worst markets -- the ones in Florida, California, Arizona, and Nevada -- seem to get all the attention. But in places such as Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, and Portland sales have slowed, but prices haven't dropped much.

The Bespoke Investment Group published a chart on its Web site using data from the Case-Shiller Median Home Price Index. It shows how much median home prices have fallen from their peaks in each of the 20 cities the index tracks.

Los Angeles-based Wilshire Finance Partners has introduced Wilshire Income Fund II, its second real estate mortgage pool fund. The fund will raise $100 million to make commercial property loans. This time around, however, the company will be able to welcome investors and borrowers from beyond the borders of the State of California.

Los Angeles-based Maguire Properties Inc. has closed the disposition of Main Plaza, selling the 607,000-square-foot trophy office complex in Irvine, Calif., to Shorenstein Properties L.L.C for $211 million including the assumption of $161 million of project level financing.